


send me home (to magic and love)

by malibae



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Comfort, Depression, Episode: s02e05 Cheat Day, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, Magic, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-18 10:27:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29608038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malibae/pseuds/malibae
Summary: “You would find your way back to sadness,” she tells him, “no matter how far you run from it.”And he asks to be sent home, as though the familiar is somehow comfort from the inevitable.Inspired by S2x05, Cheat Day - Quentin runs from loss and loses magic. And then has to return, for magic and fire and El.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6





	send me home (to magic and love)

**Author's Note:**

> okay so this is the first thing i've ever written my whole life because the magicians is just. so beautiful. i had to write words about it. BUT i have absolutely no idea how any of this works and i don't know how one becomes part of a fandom but i so want to be part of all the magic!
> 
> so. i wrote a thing. they are baby words. please be gentle.
> 
> big thank you to @caricari for all the love! (and for fixing the words because grammar is nonsense).

"Send me home,” he wishes, and she looks at him, takes a deep breath as though absorbing all else that he wants and cannot have.

There is no jerk, or whoosh, or terrible transformation, as there was in the travel to Brakebills South. Quentin just _is_ , suddenly, in the middle of an NYC street with people bustling around him. And he’s suddenly unsure if Fillory ever happened and maybe if he blinks the whole world will shift before him, so he keeps eyes open as he lifts the bow off his back and places it gently into the waste bin. Usually, he’d care that he’s dressed in what are essentially rags, torn by their journey through the forest, when he’s surrounded by smartly dressed city dwellers in suits and ties. But, for now, he’s exhausted, and he’s done, and he’s still not sure if it would have been easier, to choose to forget.

Fogg arranges an office job for him. Each morning he tugs on scratchy jackets and squeaky shoes because he doesn’t have a choice. It’s a far cry from where he thought he’d be - a hundred times more functional than Freshman-but-Clinically-Depressed Quentin ever was. He’s not sure it’s better, though.

He sits in front of his computer and wonders if this is all there is - this wake-toast-computer-coffee-lunch-done monotony - and if so, why can’t he be in tracksuits for it? El, if he knew, would disapprove so highly his eyebrows would rise off his face, but Quentin has spent most of his life in clothes as soft as he can find. When everything is terrible - too chaotic, too harsh, too much - clothes that don’t itch are… well, not a solution, but better than nothing.

‘You would find your way back to sadness,” she had told him, “no matter how far you run from it.”

And he’s not doing much running, anymore, at this same desk day in, day out, and he’s not sad, but - there’s the creeping emptiness. There’s none of the wonder, anymore - none of the frantic discovery. It’s just a mundane version of growing up. And isn’t that what he’d said, he thinks, way back when he’d needed to get out of the institution?

_I understand it now. I just need to let go of all that fantasy and just grow up._

So he lets go of the fantasy. And if he flicks a wrist to open a jam jar once in a while… well, that’s just a functional use. None of the escapism. Only the practicality.

Of course, as is the way of magic (and of life), you try and solve a problem with magic and that produces a bigger problem, and you magic that problem away and the cycle continues until there’s no more magic (or there’s no more you). And the problem remains.

He goes to lunch with Emily Greenstreet and is hopeful, (but not really), and it’s like looking back through the smallest of windows at what he left behind (but not really). He realises he’s just looking forward, to someone who’s even further from the behind than he is.

He drinks too much. Greenstreet calls him on it, and she’s not wrong - as a Magician he drank to escape the drama. Now, he drinks to escape the monotony. The drink doesn’t really solve either problem, whether too much life or too little. But, he supposes, it sort of temporarily makes you forget the problem is there.

It all goes swimmingly (or as swimmingly as he could have expected, which isn’t saying much), and he’s not thinking much when he asks if she ever casts, anymore. It feels natural enough to reach back into shared history. Except suddenly she’s claiming being late to a meeting he’d sworn was tomorrow, tipping wine down her chin and white shirt, and he waves a hand in her direction and the stain is gone but by the look on her face he might as well have thrown his own glass down her front, too, and - oh.

_Oh._

He’s solved a problem with the magic and left a bigger problem behind.

She doesn’t cast, anymore. Of course not. She left it all behind, trying to run from the fear. He left it trying to run back, into familiarity. And yet the magic comes easy - instinctual, even after all this time. It doesn’t horrify him as it does her.

But she’s gone and he’s left alone at a table for two with a half empty glass and still tingling fingers. The creeping emptiness gives way, all at once, to crashing nostalgia that's nothing like as sweet as he might have hoped. It’s just all the bitter and all the fear that in trying to run _into_ maybe he’s run _out of_ , maybe he’s just left the only place he’s ever wanted behind.

And if he’ll find his way back to sadness no matter how far he runs, might he not be back in something nearer fantasy to do it? Might he not flick a wrist to light a fire without glancing around a room to check that it’s empty? Might he not sit by the hearth with someone he knows and could love? If this is all there is, and being wine-drunk is a prerequisite for surviving, might he not have the magic, too?

And if all he’s lost feels as keen in both worlds, would he not rather live in a world with someone to share it with?

Not much has ever been instinctual, to Quentin. Everything he’s ever done has been born of practice, and failings, and mammoth last second efforts - to restore his progress to what an average human might have achieved with a small amount of work each day. His communication, his relationships, his magic, his ability to get out of bed and shower; it is all huge, and all consuming, and hard won.

Even that last time Alice and he had spoken - a thought experiment, he’d called it, because it had been. A therapy trick, learned, to keep you hopeful through the worst of it. A conscious effort to think about it even when it feels all is lost.

_What will you do, after?_

She’d eat an ice cream sundae with gummy bears. He’d try to win her back.

None of it has been easy enough to be instinctual. Except the time he threw himself in front of a knife for the girl he loved. (Probably, he thinks privately, as much to do with his lack of self-preservation as any heroics on his part).

Still, it hadn’t helped. He’d been the one to release the demon on the Niffin-Alice, the Not-Alice, the Not-the-girl-he-loved. Not the girl he loved. Not anymore. He wonders if that was the bravest thing he did their whole journey.

Quentin blinks, realises suddenly that the lunch rush of the diner has quieted and the waitress by the desk is eyeing him oddly. And now he really has missed his meeting, but decides it doesn’t matter, anyway.

Sliding out of his seat, he heads out, through the hustle of the city. Everything he’s ever wanted, he’s got. Magic is real and it can fix everything except what he needs. He asked to be sent home, away from it all, and here he is. Here he is, home, away from the Beast, and the memories, and the magic, and El, and - and all he wants is to have it back.

The door creaks as he jams in the key, shoves it open, and traipses into his - the - poky little flat. It’s not his, not the way the cottage was. It’s still too bare, too... trying too hard to reinvent itself to actually get anywhere. There’s a painting of a sunflower on the wall. A pair of trainers tossed by the bed and the lamp he smacked over in the nightmares, last night, on the dresser. A pile of clothes hung on the back of a chair where they won’t get creased to shreds, until he finds the energy to fold them. But there are no red curtains, no tasselled rug, no mountain of pillows, or drinks cupboard stacked full, or Margo or Eliot or Penny or magic.

He portals into Brakebills the next morning, scuffs his trainers bright green on the lawn as he traipses towards the Cottage. (And who’d have known, that he’d navigate this garden path alone, unthinkingly, when once he’d stumbled after a too-tall boy in too-regal clothing?). The door swings open as he approaches, two third years clinging to each other, giggling as they stagger out for air. He catches the door before it slams shut and squeezes in, feels wards tingle over his skin and admit him (even after all this time, he thinks. They knew. They knew he’d come back. No wonder they left his memories).

He hovers uncertainly for less than ten seconds before Elliot sees him and comes barreling his way, flamboyant as ever and perhaps only slightly more drunk than usual for a Wednesday mid-morning. And then he pauses, mid step, less than a foot away from Quentin. They stare for a beat of torturous silence.

“So good of you to join us, for the party of the century. Wine? Or my specialty cocktail?” and he’s thrusting a suspiciously pink and far too shimmery glass into Q’s hand and ushering him through the drapes into the next room. 

El drops into a seat and kicks his feet up onto Q’s lap and - look at that - they’re El and Q again, like they were never apart. Quentin wonders how much of it is real and how much is the cocktail, (and if - just because it’s the cocktail - that means it isn’t real). He brushes the thought away before it can settle into a frown.

El’s never been one for caution, anyway. He’s all dramatics - all doing it with conviction or not at all - because if he’s unsure then he’ll damn well be sure at least that no one knows it. Q worries at his lower lip with his teeth and wonders if he could have been friends with anyone more opposite to himself. Maybe the opposite is why they gravitated to each other in the first place.

Just this once he’s the first to speak (El’s settled into some kind of shock or cocktail stupor).

“El - “

And that’s as far as he gets, obviously, before he trails off.

“Q. How’s the drink?”

And Q’s scrunching up his nose and snorting, because of all ridiculous conversations -

“It’s fine. How are you?”

And he knows El will be offended at the dismissal of the pink - _“Fine? Fine?! How can it be fine?!”_ and all he has to do is grin and El will carry the conversation. He leans into his friend’s side and wonders if anything will ever be the same again. Wonders if he wants it to be, or if it can.

Without Alice.

They sit and Eliot talks, and they settle into quiet, eventually, sharing space and quiet breaths between then. Q has long since shoved El’s legs off his lap, but their toes meet on the floor, the tips pressing together. El, for perhaps the only time in his life, doesn’t complain about the polish on his brogues wearing down. He just slings an arm around Q’s shoulders and pulls him closer.

And it’s not much, won’t fix everything lost or anyone gone, but at least he can feel who’s still here. At least he has proof of their existence, warm solid weight at his side. Even if magic comes from pain, even if it can fix everything except what he needs, even if he will find his way back to sadness no matter how far he runs. At least he can flick a wrist to light a fire and he will not sit by it alone.


End file.
